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The aim of this survey is to account for the grammaticalisation ofepistemic modal verbs in German. In order to investigate the historicaldevelopment of linguistic structures, it is indispensable to describe thesynchronic status of these elements. Each so-called modal verb involvesvarious complement types: accusative NPs, ‘daß’-complement clauses, eventrelated control infinitives, event related raising infinitives, reportativecontrol infinitives, reportative raising infinitives and, finally,epistemic raising infinitives. As it has been suggested at many occasions,each of these patterns reflects a different stage in the historicaldevelopment of the modal verb. Accordingly, it is possible to roughlyreconstruct the grammaticalisation of these verbs by means of synchroniclanguage data. As a consequence, this study is based in large parts onsynchronic data taken from the Deutschen Referenzkorpus ‘German ReferenceCorpus’ (DeReKo) which encompassed about 2 billion word form token at thetime when the investigation here was undertaken.

First of all, it needs to be clarified what the term Modalverb preciselymeans. Traditionally, it is considered as a class which encompasses sixelements: ‘können’ (‘can’), ‘müssen’ (‘must’), ‘wollen’ (‘want’), ‘dürfen’‘be.allowed.to’, ‘sollen’ (‘shall’) and ‘mögen’ (‘may’). Yet, it isdemonstrated here that these elements do not constitute a homogeneous andconsistent class. This is mainly due to the circumstance that each of theseverbs can be realised with fairly different syntactic patterns.

Furthermore, there are a whole range of related verbs which arecharacterised by very similar features.

In contrast, the epistemic uses of these verbs form a homogeneous andconsistent class. Thus, it is much more efficient to focus on a class ofepistemic modal verbs which ignores all of the remaining syntactic patternsof each verb. From this it follows that more verbs have to be integratedinto this class: ‘brauchen’ ‘need’ and ‘werden’ ‘FUT. AUX’.

In order to understand the evolution of epistemic interpretations, it isnecessary to investigate the difference between circumstantial andepistemic modal verbs. On closer inspection, circumstantial modal verbsturn out to be event modifiers and epistemic modal verbs clausal modifiers.

Moreover, epistemic modal operators indicate that the embedded propositionis not part of the speakers knowledge.

The status of epistemic modal verbs can be more thoroughly determined ifthe environments are considered in which they cannot occur. In the pastdecades, 21 non-canonical environments for epistemic modal verbs have beenproposed. In the course of the corpus study presented here, it has revealedthat there are only eight of them in which epistemic modal verbs are reallynot attested. Most of these eight environments involve configurations inwhich the epistemic modal verb occurs in the scope of another operator,such as circumstantial modal operators or nominalisation operators.Interestingly, reportative modal verbs are attested in some of thesecontexts and they are significantly more acceptable.

This circumstance can most efficiently be captured in terms of anchoringconditions. Epistemic modal operators are operators which introduce avariable for a deictic centre with respect to whose knowledge the validityof the embedded proposition is evaluated. In the most canonical case, thedeictic centre is identical to the speaker.